A reprint edition of the classic novel by a writer who did not publish her first book until 1951, when she was sixty-three. Dermoût was born in Java, in the Dutch East Indies, and in this short, atmospheric fiction she chronicles the end of the colonial era, seen through the eyes of Felicia, a woman schooled in the legends and textures, sights and sounds—the ten thousand things of the universe as they appear in the Spice Islands, where proas sail close to shore, fruits grow in profusion, and murders abound. Likewise ceremonies to keep the evil spirits at bay. Felicia devises one of her own to mark the death of her son—a ritual that marks the passing of an order, which helped to shape modern-day Indonesia.